codepawl/mars-hirise-terrain

Mars HiRISE Terrain

Real Martian ground at 1 m per post, cut from HiRISE stereo terrain models into game-ready tiles: GLB meshes at four LODs that stitch without cracks, 16-bit PNG and float EXR heightmaps in real metres, orthoimage textures in KTX2, collision meshes and a phone tier.

Not endorsed by NASA, JPL or the University of Arizona. HiRISE data is public domain; credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona.

320 tiles from 20 sites: 18 HiRISE digital terrain models at about 1 m per post and 2 wide sites from the MOLA global DEM at 463 m per post with Viking colour. Each site is a 4 x 4 grid of tiles, 512 posts on a side, cut from the steepest fully valid part of the DTM. 126.12 GB of source DTMs; 919.2 MB of LOD0 GLB. Credit: HiRISE DTMs and orthoimages: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona. Wide sites: MOLA MEGDR DEM (NASA Goddard, MGS MOLA team) and Viking MDIM 2.1 colorized mosaic, both via the USGS Astrogeology Science Center.

Viewer, fly over any site: https://huggingface.co/spaces/codepawl/mars-hirise-terrain-viewer

Sites

Site	Mission	Centre	Size	Post spacing	Elevation	Source DTM
Western Candor Chasma, Valles Marineris		6.59° S, 283.26° E	2.07 km	1.0116 m	1,241 to 2,174 m	DTEEC_003474_1735_003540_1735_A01
Coprates Chasma wall, Valles Marineris		14.06° S, 300.46° E	2.07 km	1.0106 m	1,404 to 3,002 m	DTEEC_046764_1660_050812_1660_A01
Eberswalde crater delta		23.91° S, 326.41° E	2.06 km	1.0082 m	-1,411 to -1,343 m	DTEEC_001336_1560_001534_1560_U01
Endeavour crater west rim	Opportunity	2.31° S, 354.65° E	2.07 km	1.0118 m	-1,692 to -1,380 m	DTEEC_018701_1775_018846_1775_U01
Gale crater, Bagnold dunes	Curiosity	4.76° S, 137.42° E	2.07 km	1.0118 m	-4,023 to -3,515 m	DTEEC_040770_1755_039280_1755_A01
Gale crater, Aeolis Mons canyon	Curiosity	5.19° S, 137.33° E	2.07 km	1.0117 m	-2,828 to -2,305 m	DTEEC_012340_1750_012195_1750_A01
Gullies on the Hale crater wall		35.21° S, 324.71° E	2.06 km	1.0039 m	-578 to 1,006 m	DTEEC_002932_1445_003209_1445_A01
Jezero crater delta	Perseverance	18.56° N, 77.43° E	2.07 km	1.0096 m	-2,522 to -2,406 m	DTEEC_002387_1985_003798_1985_A01
Jezero crater floor, Perseverance landing area	Perseverance	18.50° N, 77.42° E	2.07 km	1.0097 m	-2,544 to -2,409 m	DTEEC_045994_1985_046060_1985_U01
Kaiser crater dune field		46.76° S, 20.15° E	2.05 km	0.9994 m	1,031 to 1,321 m	DTEEC_006899_1330_006965_1330_U01
East Melas Chasma landslide scarp, Valles Marineris		13.15° S, 290.67° E	2.07 km	1.0108 m	-2,424 to -796 m	DTEEC_036307_1665_035951_1665_A01
Gullies in Newton Basin		41.59° S, 202.30° E	2.05 km	1.0015 m	-935 to -5 m	DTEEC_005943_1380_011428_1380_A01
Layered pit in Noctis Labyrinthus		7.73° S, 267.19° E	2.07 km	1.0115 m	-463 to 1,075 m	DTEEC_005980_1725_019891_1725_A01
Olympus Mons basal scarp		21.56° N, 222.33° E	2.07 km	1.0087 m	5,469 to 6,740 m	DTEEC_001432_2015_001630_2015_U01
Olympus Mons, the whole volcano		18.65° N, 226.20° E	948 km	463 m	-3,249 to 21,203 m	MOLA MEGDR 463 m
Pangboche crater on Olympus Mons		17.29° N, 226.68° E	2.07 km	1.0099 m	20,175 to 21,189 m	DTEEC_005533_1975_005388_1975_A01
Proctor crater dune field		47.17° S, 30.73° E	2.05 km	0.9993 m	506 to 660 m	DTEEC_003800_1325_004077_1325_U01
Russell crater megadune		54.24° S, 12.92° E	2.04 km	0.9966 m	241 to 647 m	DTEEC_007018_1255_007229_1255_A01
Valles Marineris, Ius to Coprates		8.00° S, 290.00° E	948 km	463 m	-5,500 to 6,918 m	MOLA MEGDR 463 m
Victoria crater	Opportunity	2.04° S, 354.51° E	2.07 km	1.0119 m	-1,444 to -1,365 m	DTEEC_021747_1780_022380_1780_U01

Files

Folder	Size	What	For
objects/	919.2 MB	LOD0: the full 513 x 513 post grid, meshopt, WebP orthoimage at 2048 px	three.js, Babylon.js, any glTF viewer with the meshopt decoder
objects_ktx2/	1.02 GB	LOD0 with the orthoimage in KTX2 (ETC1S), mipmaps	WebGPU and WebGL games: textures stay compressed on the GPU
lods/	275.9 MB	lod1, lod2, lod3: every 2nd, 4th and 8th post (257², 129², 65²), KTX2 at 1024, 512, 256 px	distance LOD; tiles at different levels stitch through their skirts
mobile/	61.6 MB	the lod2 grid with a 512 px KTX2 texture	phones and light laptops
engine/	4.91 GB	LOD0 with no meshopt and no quantization, PNG texture	Blender and desktop engines that cannot decode meshopt
collision/	48.0 MB	a 65 x 65 post grid, no skirts, no texture	trimesh colliders in Rapier, Jolt, PhysX, Godot, Unity
heightmaps/	350.4 MB	513 x 513 heightmap per tile: 16-bit PNG and float32 EXR (metres)	engine terrain systems, your own mesher
sites/	418.8 MB	the whole 4 x 4 site as one 2049 x 2049 heightmap (PNG16, EXR), a 4096 px orthoimage and site.json	Unity and Unreal style terrains, one import per site

metadata.jsonl has one line per tile: site, mission, the tile's row and column in its site, centre and corner latitude and longitude (planetocentric, east-positive), elevation range, post spacing, tile size, skirt depth per LOD and the path and size of every file. Thumbnails are in thumbs/.

Coordinates and heights

• Metres, +X east, +Z south, +Y up. Every GLB tile carries its offset from the site centre on its node, so loading all 16 tiles of a site puts them together.
• Vertex heights are elevation minus the site base (site_base_elevation_m), so a site's tiles share one datum. Elevations are metres above the Mars areoid, as in the source DTM.
• EXR heightmaps hold the elevation in metres in the R channel. 16-bit PNGs map 0..65535 onto the site's heightmap_png_range_m: elevation = base + value / 65535 * (top - base).
• Heightmap post (0, 0) is the tile's north-west corner and matches GLB UV (0, 0). Neighbouring tiles share their edge row of posts.
• The orthoimage is HiRISE RED, a single red-filter band, so it is grey. Tint it in the material if you want Mars colour.

LODs that stitch

Each LOD keeps every 2nd, 4th or 8th post of the same grid, so tiles always share their corner posts. Skirts hang from every tile edge, deep enough to cover the gap to any other LOD on that edge: each tile's own edge error plus the coarsest LOD's error there plus 0.5 m and two steps of the 16-bit position grid.

Checked on the published files: every pair of neighbouring tiles at every pair of levels (LOD0, lod1, lod2, lod3, mobile), 12,000 of 12,000 pairs pass. Edges meet within 0.9 cm across the border, and the worst height gap is 99 % of the skirt that covers it.

For web games and WebGPU

Load objects_ktx2/ near the camera and switch to lods/ with distance: KTX2 textures stay block-compressed on the GPU (BC7 on desktop, ASTC or ETC2 on phones). mobile/ is the phone tier. collision/ is a light grid for physics.

Measured on 12 tiles. Phone page: 390x844 at 3x, pixel ratio capped at 2, CPU throttled 4x, network at Chrome's Fast 4G (150 ms, 9 Mbit/s), so phone load includes the download. The GPU is a desktop RTX 3060 and is not throttled: frame time shows the CPU side only, a real phone GPU is slower.

Tier	File (median)	VRAM (median)	Triangles	Phone load (4G)	Frame time	WebGPU load (local)
web (12)	3.0 MB	31.5 MiB	532,480	3255 ms	1.1 ms	65 ms
ktx2 (12)	3.3 MB	15.5 MiB	532,480	3593 ms	1.5 ms	52 ms
lod2 (12)	0.2 MB	0.8 MiB	34,816	358 ms	0.8 ms	9 ms
mobile (12)	0.2 MB	0.8 MiB	34,816	380 ms	0.8 ms	8 ms

A whole site with distance LOD in three.js WebGPU:

import * as THREE from 'three';
import { WebGPURenderer } from 'three/webgpu';
import { GLTFLoader } from 'three/addons/loaders/GLTFLoader.js';
import { KTX2Loader } from 'three/addons/loaders/KTX2Loader.js';
import { MeshoptDecoder } from 'three/addons/libs/meshopt_decoder.module.js';

const renderer = new WebGPURenderer({ antialias: true });
await renderer.init();
const ktx2 = new KTX2Loader().setTranscoderPath('https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/three@0.187.0/examples/jsm/libs/basis/').detectSupport(renderer);
const loader = new GLTFLoader().setKTX2Loader(ktx2).setMeshoptDecoder(MeshoptDecoder);
const base = 'https://huggingface.co/datasets/codepawl/mars-hirise-terrain/resolve/main';
const site = 'jezero-delta';
const scene = new THREE.Scene();
for (let row = 0; row < 4; row++) {
  for (let column = 0; column < 4; column++) {
    const id = `${site}_r${row}c${column}`;
    const lod = new THREE.LOD();
    const levels = [[`objects_ktx2/${id}/${id}.glb`, 0], [`lods/${id}/${id}_lod1.glb`, 600], [`lods/${id}/${id}_lod2.glb`, 1200], [`lods/${id}/${id}_lod3.glb`, 2400]];
    for (const [file, distance] of levels) {
      const tile = (await loader.loadAsync(`${base}/${file}`)).scene;
      lod.addLevel(tile, distance);
    }
    scene.add(lod);
  }
}

Use it in 67js

67js loads these files as they are:

npm install 67js@npm:@codepawlhq/67js meshoptimizer

import { Renderer67 } from '67js';
import { loadGltf } from '67js/addons/gltf';
import { MeshoptDecoder } from 'meshoptimizer';

const asset = await loadGltf('https://huggingface.co/datasets/codepawl/mars-hirise-terrain/resolve/main/mobile/jezero-delta_r1c1/jezero-delta_r1c1.glb', { decoders: { meshopt: MeshoptDecoder } });
const renderer = new Renderer67(document.querySelector('canvas'), asset.parts);
renderer.render({ eye: [0, 400, 700], target: [0, 0, 0] });

Tested

Every GLB was loaded and drawn (drawn pixels counted) in each engine, three.js 0.187.0 and 67js 0.15.0, files from a local copy of this repository.

Tier	three.js WebGL	three.js WebGPU	67js
web	320/320	320/320	320/320
ktx2	320/320	320/320	320/320
lod1	320/320	320/320	320/320
lod2	320/320	320/320	320/320
lod3	320/320	320/320	320/320
mobile	320/320	320/320	320/320
engine	320/320	320/320	320/320
collision	320/320	319/320	320/320

Blender 5.2 import: engine 320/320, objects 320/320, collision 320/320. Godot 4.7 import: 12/12 engine files. Godot terrain: 20/20 site heightmaps (EXR) loaded as an Image and built into a HeightMapShape3D at the right height range.

Licence and credit

HiRISE DTMs and orthoimages: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona. Wide sites: MOLA MEGDR DEM (NASA Goddard, MGS MOLA team) and Viking MDIM 2.1 colorized mosaic, both via the USGS Astrogeology Science Center. Licence: public-domain (https://www.uahirise.org/media/usage.php).

Changes made: Each HiRISE DTM was cut to a 4 x 4 grid of 512-post tiles on its steepest fully valid part, a handful of missing posts filled from the nearest valid post, heights offset to a per-site base, and the RED orthoimage resampled to 2048 px per tile with a per-site contrast stretch (it stays grey: HiRISE RED is a single red-filter band). Meshes are regular grids at four LODs with skirts, meshopt-compressed; textures recompressed as WebP and KTX2. The wide sites reproject MOLA and Viking colour to an equirectangular grid true to scale at the site latitude. Heights are otherwise as published.

Source: https://www.uahirise.org/dtm/. Packed by CodePawl.